10 man, 2 melee in group, on our tries we had people dieing in phase 2 either by the poison dot or by eventually thok killing them as he got faster. We chose the extend phase 2 strategy but our ranged dps wasn't the best of it and we were missing crucial melee contribution.

Originally Posted by rhorle

A Daily quest is about as much effort as organizing 20 people.

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler

Brian may answer differently, but I would say mages are hard to counter for average players but easy for great players.

I dont think there's a 'right' answer to give you - it very much depends on what your group is good at doing; based on what you've said though option A sounds like it might be more viable. I also raid 10m and we had a hard time on Thok until we basically ignored the advice from strategy guides/videos that said it was best leaving the fire phase until last. Instead, we took the fire phase first and pushed to last as long as we could during it (stacked up, cooldowns etc) and I think we made it to about 8 stacks of amplification before the phase change. We kite the boss between his spawn point and the entrance to the room, the door all the way up the corridor, while all the ranged DPS do what they can and melee takes care of the jailer.

You mention the poison dot as killing some people - we also found that we had some trouble with the damage that it put out, primarily in that the healers just did not have the globals/cd to be able to dispel all of the stacks ourselves. It led to our warlock using his imp to help dispel and everything else doing everything that they could to minimise the damage or dispel if at all possible.

With more melee DPS, it's likely that prolonging Phase 1 is going to be more useful to you.

By stacking in 3 small groups of 3 or 4 within an Efflorescence or healing rain, you can stay in P1 for much longer, before all stacking as one group when you want to push the phase - this allows more than 5 people to be sub 50% hp at anyone time, and makes better use of HoTs which should get people topped back up again before the next Screech.

Hopefully that strategy will help, even if you can't get all the way up to 99 stacks

Another tip - Devotion Aura can be used to mitigate the silence effect of the screech, allowing 6 seconds of healing with no interrupts when required. I imagine some other abilities may have a similar effect?

That said, I'll describe my own guilds tactic for this boss:

Phase 1 A - 9+ Stacks of Acceleration, (we also solo tank this phase entirely with a cooldown chain on a Prot Paladin)
Phase 2 - Open the Prison at 5 stacks of the speed increase, Poison Prison first as it's annoying.
Phase 1 B - 6 Stacks of Acceleration (try not too much more than this on normal as the Poison debuffs make things unnecessarily risky)
Phase 2 - Open the Prison at 5 stacks of the speed increase, Frost Prison
Phase 1 C - 9+ Stacks of Acceleration (we also solo tank this phase entirely with a cooldown chain on a Prot Paladin)
Phase 2 - Open the Prison at 5 stacks of the speed increase, Fire Prison
Phase 1 D - This phase sucks as well, usually the boss is nearly dead at this point so you have 4 options:
......Option 1 - Spread out and nuke to kill the boss
......Option 2 - Spread out for a few stacks of acceleration before stacking up on a safe location (usually use a player) to try push Blood Frenzy.
......Option 3 - Stack up pretty much straight away and rotate healer cooldowns to heal through the fire damage on the raid without moving.
......Option 4 - Stack up pretty much straight away and try and force Blood Frenzy straight away.
We usually do either Option 1 or Option 4 depending on how low the boss is, if he's above 15% we just push a Blood Frenzy straight away and kite for the rest of the fight, if he's sub 15% (I think this week he was on about 2 or 3% anyway lol) we just stay spread and nuke) but other guilds I know have done both 2 and 3.... I also know guilds who have done the prisons in a different order with no issue. Finding the best way for your raid to do it is the main thing!

However, I'd definitely recommend prolonging P1s as much as possible... if you end up struggling with the soft enrage, you could of course also prolong both phases!

The first Phase 1 and the Frost phase 1 are noticeably easier than the rest, so if you are going to push for 15-20-25-30+ stacks of Acceleration, those are the ones to do it in!

On the first phase we could make it to about 10 stacks of acceleration before stacking.

We get through this fight by extending the first phase as long as possible since the lower you get the boss here, the less you have to worry about DoT's and crap later.
Last week we probably managed about 27 stacks, this week we pushed 43ish.

First thing I'd fix is the monk, I don't know much about them sadly but he should be doing a lot better. Perhaps look in class specific forums for advice about him.

Pally is pretty simple.
1) Hes talented DP over HA. HA is fantastic burst on demand, perfect for extending phase one.
2) He doesn't use his healing cooldowns at all. No Avenging wrath or divine favour (massive throughput CD's)
3) He didn't bubble at all. Bubbling would let him heal uninterrupted for its duration.
4) If he talents clemency he can double BoP. Also very useful to allow someone to channel something like tranq. Added bonus is it negates damage from screech for 2 people instead of one.

5 stacks of the movement speed sounds low...we're doing thok on normal today....on flex we were getting up to 15-16 lol

Opening the Prison at ~5 stacks of the speed buff, means that the boss will end P2 at ~9-10 stacks of the speed buff; takes a while for the NPCs to go out. There isn't really a need to prolong P2s anymore than that, we usually just aim to get out asap to avoid someone being a mook and getting eaten :P

I know for Heroic Thok you can't go past 30 stacks or else it will start to one shot. Two groups of 4 people + 2 tanks. We have 3 healers + shadow priest for divine star in the "back group" and our 2 melee, hunter and mage in our melee group. Groups are at the edges of healing rain / efflorescence so both get that healing. Around 20 stacks the melee group moves to the healers and they use smoke / barrier / link and so forth and we aim to push around 28 stacks.

In phase 2 we kite the boss around the room in a circle once, then down towards the entrance and right before he finishes his fixate we open the cage and by the time he runs all the way back he will go into the next phase. It could be delayed about another 5 seconds, but do it then just to be safe. Rinse and repeat. If you're practicing the positioning to ever try heroic, you're trying to stay in both phases as long as possible and avoid fire completely. If you get to fire you just stack and push right away and kill him in the last kite phase.

Take this with a grain of salt, our best attempt on heroic thok has been around 40%.

We actually pop lust and have our whole raid stack at the beginning (ranged and melee on the side of the boss) and heal through about 15+ stacks before having our healers intentionally let the raid drop low. For positioning on the fight, picture a triangle -- we start at the point on the top... Once he moves into his phase 2, everyone except the person targeted moves to one of the lower points as the first person targeted runs down the hallway. The rest of the raid moves into the direct center of the room, and from there, we have the person kiting run circles around the room in a specific direction.

It sounds a little more complicated than some of the strats above, but it worked fairly well for our group which had 2-3 melee at any given time who were prone to getting eaten. We also 3-healed the fight since we had a shaman, rdruid and holy priest, and were able to heal through a lot more than necessary.

If you have a pally, remember that popping devo gives the healers a clear shot to keep everyone up for ~6 solid seconds (good time for tranq / hymn).